Eternal and Infinite Physical existence?

[shunyadragon]

Ok, so now it is a matter of preference? And I'm not making a judgement these scientist are. And BTW Shuny YOU DID SAY THAT THIS WAS EVIDENCE for some more than our universe existing.

I did not say it was evidence for other universes. I believe all this data, theories, and hypotheses together form the body of evidence for the existence beyond our universe.

[shunyadragon]

Ok, so now it is a matter of preference? And I'm not making a judgement these scientist are. And BTW Shuny YOU DID SAY THAT THIS WAS EVIDENCE for some more than our universe existing.



So you said that the Penrose study (which was what I linked) was in fact evidence for something more than just our universe existing.

Here is what another set of Scientists are saying:

http://www.usnews.com/science/articl...ea-may-be-dead

Your overstating my consideration of this evidence as evidence for multiverses. I specifically said I reserve judgment on the out come of these different views on the evidence as to what these regions in the cosmos represent. I at present have supported Vilenkin's and Krauss's work. I may present more, but I have left open judgment on this work.

[seer]

That would be from the symmetry of a gravity wave at those scales, but lets not dive into it. I don't feel like dissecting it. And actually I agree with you that there's no evidential support for proposal Penrose gave. I think he shares that opinion (judging from a talk at Unbelievable Radio, he seems fairly humble). I suspect he'll try the algorithm's on the Planck dataset once it comes out. Just because you're arguing with me, it doesn't mean that I disagree with everything you say. You don't seem to get the point which was that you accused him of just making up predictions unmotivated. That's a serious accusation Seer, and I think I've given plenty of evidence that this is wrong. Actually it was only this that I was objecting to.

Ok, but I was speaking specifically of these circular anomalies in the background radiation. From the stuff I read yesterday it was pretty clear that we have seen anomalies in the CMB for years, just not so defined. Circular anomalies, if he predicted them, would have been something. Now you say he did predict such anomalies - I'll have to take your word for it. Except,also from what I read, I guess he was wrong about what observed.

[seer]

Your overstating my consideration of this evidence as evidence for multiverses. I specifically said I reserve judgment on the out come of these different views on the evidence as to what these regions in the cosmos represent. I at present have supported Vilenkin's and Krauss's work. I may present more, but I have left open judgment on this work.

There is no evidence for a multiverse. How much you want to bet if you link me to Vilenkin's work it will go the way of Penrose's assumptions?


From the New Scientist this year, it seems that Vilenkin has come to a different conclusion:

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event
11 January 2012 by Lisa Grossman
Magazine issue 2847.

The big bang may not have been the beginning of everything – but new calculations suggest we still need a cosmic starter gun

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.

Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time (see diagram).

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."

Not everyone subscribes to eternal inflation, however, so the idea of an eternal universe still had a foothold. Another option is a cyclic universe, in which the big bang is not really the beginning but more of a bounce back following a previous collapsed universe. The universe goes through infinite cycles of big bangs and crunches with no specific beginning. Cyclic universes have an "irresistible poetic charm and bring to mind the Phoenix", says Vilenkin, quoting Georges Lemaître, an astronomer who died in 1966. Yet when he looked at what this would mean for the universe's disorder, again the figures didn't add up.

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.

One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn't increase, so needn't reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

Vilenkin's final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally "cracked" to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed - and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

"This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe," Vilenkin concludes. "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

http://www.newscient...ion-event.html?

[shunyadragon]

There is no evidence for a multiverse. How much you want to bet if you link me to Vilenkin's work it will go the way of Penrose's assumptions?


From the New Scientist this year, it seems that Vilenkin has come to a different conclusion:

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event
11 January 2012 by Lisa Grossman
Magazine issue 2847.



http://www.newscient...ion-event.html?

This reference only refers to Vilenkin's work concerning the nature of our universe and other possible univeres. Lisa Grossman like Craig's work misuses Vilenkin's view in an unethical way, and over all work concerning the the nature of the greater cosmos. Actually, Craig at least has backed off somewhat on his original claims concerning Vilenkin's research. It is best to read all of Vilenkin's work and understand it instead of selectively citing the work quote mining for things that want to support what you believe. I have done this a number of times before, and will do it again in the next post to give Vilenkin's correct view of multiverses and the nature of the greater cosmos.

Vilenkin's theory only applies to the begining of the expansion of a universe, including all possible universes.

[seer]

This reference only refers to Vilenkin's work concerning the nature of our universe and other possible univeres. Lisa Grossman like Craig's work misuses Vilenkin's view in an unethical way, and over all work concerning the the nature of the greater cosmos. Actually, Craig at least has backed off somewhat on his original claims concerning Vilenkin's research. It is best to read all of Vilenkin's work and understand it instead of selectively citing the work quote mining for things that want to support what you believe. I have done this a number of times before, and will do it again in the next post to give Vilenkin's correct view of multiverses and the nature of the greater cosmos.

Nonsense Shuny, now you accuse The New Scientist of basically lying! The article quotes why an eternal universe or infinite cycles of universe are not possible. And it is clear that Vilenkin agrees. The fact is Shuny, there is zero evidence for an eternal universe or and infinite number of past universes.

And BTW Craig has not backed off

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/...rticle&id=7289


George Ellis:

http://closertotruth.com/video-profi...rge-Ellis-/924

[phank]

As far as I can tell, all the evidence available to us now indicates that our universe as we know it had a starting point. I would suppose the sort of conditions that could generate a universe like ours are somewhat constrained by the sort of universe we're in, and what we can learn about its early development. Beyond those constraints, there are countless possibilities. Certainly the scope for models that are not inconsistent with what is known, is quite large.

What concerns me is the use of religious sites to address cosmological questions which are much more within the realm of physics. My suspicion is that religious sites bring as baggage such an overwhelming confirmation bias for their own creation myths as to completely overwhelm whatever science can be brought to bear. Especially when these religious sites are being linked to by someone who invariably pastes an opaque layer of religion over everything he gets near.

[seer]

What concerns me is the use of religious sites to address cosmological questions which are much more within the realm of physics. My suspicion is that religious sites bring as baggage such an overwhelming confirmation bias for their own creation myths as to completely overwhelm whatever science can be brought to bear. Especially when these religious sites are being linked to by someone who invariably pastes an opaque layer of religion over everything he gets near.

Well Phank, perhaps this whole question has a religious answer rather than a scientific one.

[shunyadragon]

Nonsense Shuny, now you accuse The New Scientist of basically lying! The article quotes why an eternal universe or infinite cycles of universe are not possible. And it is clear that Vilenkin agrees. The fact is Shuny, there is zero evidence for an eternal universe or and infinite number of past universes.

And BTW Craig has not backed off

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/...rticle&id=7289


George Ellis:

http://closertotruth.com/video-profi...rge-Ellis-/924

New Scientist is not lying, because it is referring to only one of Vilenkin's publications. Craig is dishonestly misrepresenting Vilenkin's views on multiverses and the greater cosmos. His work referred to in New Scientist only addresses that this universe and all possible universes begins with inflation, and has no reference to the absolute beginning of our physical existence. He describes some aspects of his work in multiverse and the nature of the greater cosmos here . . .

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/vilenkin...n06_index.html
. .

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/vilenkin06/vilenkin06_index.html

In the global view of eternal inflation, the boundaries of island universes are the regions where big bangs are happening right now. Newly formed islands are microscopically small, but they grow without limit as they get older. Central parts of large island universes are very old: big bangs once took place there long time ago. Now they are dark and barren: all stars have long since died there. But regions at the periphery of the islands are new and must be teeming with shining stars.

The inhabitants of island universes, like us, see a different picture. They do not perceive their universe as a finite island. For them it appears as a self-contained, infinite universe. That dramatic difference in perspective is a consequence of the differences imposed by the ways of keeping time appropriate to the global and internal views of the island universe. (According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time is not fixed, but instead is observer dependent.)

© source where applicable

He does not advocate in anyway based on his research that the beginning of our universe is the absolute beginning of our physical existence.

It would be best to read his book; Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes by Alex Vilenkin

[shunyadragon]

Well Phank, perhaps this whole question has a religious answer rather than a scientific one.

I have demonstrated in the above reference the problem of apologists like Craig,and others misusing Vilenkin's work to support the bias of traditional theistic beliefs, which is unethical and dishonest. This thread is to address scientific references only. New Scientist is more a layman's magazine, ok but limited. The references in the article you referred to only addressed part of Vilenkin's work that addresses the nature of the beginning of any possible universe within a greater multiverse cosmos.

[phank]

Well Phank, perhaps this whole question has a religious answer rather than a scientific one.

But perhaps it does not. My point is that if you presume a religious answer, you are going to find one. Granted, the nice thing about the religious answers is that no evidence is really required at all. And if there is any, a religious orientation will MAKE that evidence correspond to religious preconvictions whether it actually does or not.

The danger of presuming a religious answer is that once presumed, a religious answer is basically impossible to dislodge. From that point forward, anything inconsistent with the religious answer simply is not evidence. I prefer reading about efforts to puzzle this stuff together in search of a best-fit explanation, and seeing that explanation change as new evidence leads to a better fit with some different model. The religious process of fitting evidence to Truth rather than fitting conclusions to evidence has a frankly terrible track record of modeling reality. But a GREAT track record at satisfying people that ignorance is knowledge.

[seer]

New Scientist is not lying, because it is referring to only one of Vilenkin's publications. Craig is dishonestly misrepresenting Vilenkin's views on multiverses and the greater cosmos. His work referred to in New Scientist only addresses that this universe and all possible universes begins with inflation, and has no reference to the absolute beginning of our physical existence. He describes some aspects of his work in multiverse and the nature of the greater cosmos here . . .

Well yes Shuny, that is exactly what the New Scientist said. Eternal inflation does not happen, this universe had a beginning. ALL THEORIES DEMAND A BEGINNING. This information is from THIS YEAR - not a book written years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

So this universe had a beginning, what is left but an infinite number of previous universes leading to this one, and they address that:

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.

So Shuny, let's go back to the topic of this thread and my claim that there is zero evidence for an eternal universe or an infinite number of past universes. My claim is correct, there is no evidence for an eternal universe/universes.

[shunyadragon]

Well yes Shuny, that is exactly what the New Scientist said. Eternal inflation does not happen, this universe had a beginning. ALL THEORIES DEMAND A BEGINNING. This information is from THIS YEAR - not a book written years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

So this universe had a beginning, what is left but an infinite number of previous universes leading to this one, and they address that:

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.

So Shuny, let's go back to the topic of this thread and my claim that there is zero evidence for an eternal universe or an infinite number of past universes. My claim is correct, there is no evidence for an eternal universe/universes.

No your claim is not correct it is blatantly dishonest, selectively citing Vilenkin's research to support what you believe.

The article in New Scientist does not represent Vilenkin's current research. It cites older research only concerning his GRD theory of all possible universes begin with inflation.

This again is a repetition of the dishonest unethical misuse of Vilenkin's work for an unethical, dishonest traditional theist agenda. Vilenkin never proposed a cyclic nor a one universe pyhsical existence with an absolute beginning, that you dishonestly and unethically assert. The research cited in the New Scientist article only refers to the the theory that all possible universes have a beginning with inflation. Again your unethical dishonest assertion that the GRD theory of Vilenkin's work cited has anything to do with whether there is or is not evidence of multiverses and an infinite eternal cosmos has been documented as false by citations.

I have cited Vilenkin's article and the book

[seer]

No your claim is not correct it is blatantly dishonest, selectively citing Vilenkin's research to support what you believe.

The article in New Scientist does not represent Vilenkin's current research. It cites older research only concerning his GRD theory of all possible universes begin with inflation.

This again is a repetition of the dishonest unethical misuse of Vilenkin's work for an unethical, dishonest traditional theist agenda. Vilenkin never proposed a cyclic nor a one universe pyhsical existence with an absolute beginning, that you dishonestly and unethically assert. The research cited in the New Scientist article only refers to the the theory that all possible universes have a beginning with inflation. Again your unethical dishonest assertion that the GRD theory of Vilenkin's work cited has anything to do with whether there is or is not evidence of multiverses and an infinite eternal cosmos has been documented as false by citations.

I have cited Vilenkin's article and the book

Shuny, you are getting off topic. So let's focus.

1. This universe had a beginning.

2. An infinite number of past universes leading to this one does not work.

3. According to the article, and Vilenkin's own quote the eternal inflation model also can not work. And I quote:

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.

Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time (see diagram).

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."

Shuny remember this talk was given this year, it quotes Vilenkin from THIS YEAR. So "eternal inflation" can not be eternal into the past according to Vilenkin. An infinite number of past universes can not be the answer for the reasons stated. And neither can the static state. So where is the evidence for "Eternal and Infinite Physical existence?"

Please show it to us, what is the NAME of this theory? Remember he said ALL THESE THEORIES demand a beginning. Which theory DOESN'T demand a beginning?

[phank]

This question is ambiguous. What, exactly, is "a beginning"? In cosmological terms, this seems arbitrary. That's why I wrote that our universe as we know it had a beginning. Before that, we don't know. Could be there are many universes being kicked off all the time. Could be our universe resulted from some sort of phase change within some other universe. But to discuss "a beginning", you must establish some boundaries to delineate it.

Otherwise, did you "begin" at birth? At conception? At your parents' birth? Your grandparents' conception? Perhaps we could say that conception is a phase change that occurs at the moment of interaction of two bits of some prior phase.

Vilenkin is quoted here referring to "some kind of boundary." Is that a "beginning"? We must define our terms better. But we might note in the process that these people are using a combination of observations and math to construct and test their models. Nothing religious at all.